Hardly a Criminal (Apenas un delincuente) (1949), dir. Hugo Fregonese. Thursday, January 26, The Heights Theater.

The opening film in the Heights Argentinian Noir series is a crisp little crime film called Hardly a Criminal. Here, a corrupt accountant embezzles over a half a million pesos, knowing that, if caught, he would only get sentenced for 6 years in prison, the maximum for embezzlers. He does the quick math–for that amount of money, he’d have to work over 100 years. So he steals it, goes gambling, and then brazenly allows himself to get arrested, basically crooning over his trick. Problem is, all this braggadocio attracts the attention of some very awful people, who help our man escape and then torture the living hell out of him to get his loot. No one emerges unscathed, not the anti-hero, not the cops, not the criminals, and not the man’s family or his girlfriend.

This is a tight plot, nicely executed. Problem is, the hero, who is lamented over later as “hardly a criminal”, but is noted as “really just a poor boy who was lured by money” (I’m paraphrasing that last part), is a lousy human being. He is a criminal, full stop–not hardly, but totally. He’s shown ripping his own brother off when the two of them were kids, he’s engaged to a nice woman but lusting after a dancer who only wants rich men, he is always on the prowl for loads of cash and, though not violent, doesn’t seem to care about any of the collateral damage from his deeds, which, as you may surmise, results in plenty of violence to himself, to the villains, but also to plenty of good people. Worse, he’s an idiot–it’s not as though there’s the beating heart of a poet or artist beneath this gruff exterior, a good man simply sick of crushing poverty. Our hero actually has a good job, it just doesn’t pay enough for him to sleep around with glamorous women and gamble all day. That makes it hard to be fully committed to this film, because eventually I found myself eager to just see him get toasted, despite what it did to those around him.